Local color

by Jeremy Clarke, SJ

The Chinese school of Christian art

Photograph: Courtesy of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, USF Center for the Pacific Rim. Click image to enlarge.

When he arrived in China in 1922 as its first Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Celso Costantini brought a fresh missionary vision, set out in Pope Benedict XV’s 1919 encyclical Maximum Illud (“On the Propagation of Faith Throughout the World”). Benedict encouraged the cultivation of indigenous clergy and the integration of local culture into Church activities. Costantini (who became a cardinal in 1953) promoted the founding of Furen Daxue (the Catholic University of Peking) in 1925 and within it, in 1930, an art department that fostered works incorporating the styles and traditions of China—students studied classical techniques of painting with calligraphy brushes on vertical scrolls of paper and silk—in Christian imagery.

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“Rising gothic spires,” opined Costantini in 1923, “are in magnificent harmony with the countryside of Northern Europe; but I am not in anyway able to say the same about the gothic towers that I have seen nestled among bamboo groves during my journey throughout China.” The tradition of the Church, he later wrote, “tells us that we should make use of the art of a given people and of a given time.” By the time the Furen art department closed, in 1952 following the communist revolution, its students had produced hundreds of pieces of Chinese-style Christian art, depicting subjects ranging from the Visit of the Magi to the Crucifixion.

Lu Hongnian (1919–89) was a 1936 graduate of Furen and among the earliest of a generation of artists to produce such works. His rendering of the Annunciation (right) bears the inscription, in Chinese: “Painted by Taicang Lu Hongnian, at Beiping, Spring Festival, 1947.” Lu employed elements traditional in an Annunciation scene: the angel carrying white irises (symbolizing purity), the Holy Spirit (represented by a dove), and the kneeling Mary. But he introduces indigenous symbols, as well. The angel hovers on Chinese-style clouds, an allusion to the apsaras (female spirits common in Hindu and Buddhist mythology). The furniture and fashion are classically Chinese—the window shutter with its fretwork, the low red table, the angel’s hairstyle.

Bamboo and flowers were notable features of Chinese artwork, and Lu displays a mastery of them. The bamboo fronds and stalks outside the open window are delicate yet distinct, a nod toward the reverence of the natural world expressed in both Daoism and Buddhism. Finally, the orange daylilies in the foreground are exactly what a Chinese person would expect to see at Spring Festival, since the flowers symbolize birth.

Jeremy Clarke, SJ, is an assistant professor of history and the author of The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History (2013), from which this account is drawn.